The Chronicle of the Worthy Son

Wells

The thick heat dissipated in the westerly wind. Able lingered on the porch to let the breeze clear his senses and his eyes adjust to the dark. The stars appeared in fits and starts. One of the brightest was the Wrangler's Hand, and, if the book's calculations were accurate, a far dimmer object was six degrees east of it. Something he'd need a set of custom ground lenses to see. Which he might have gotten if he could only curb his pamphlet habit.

Instead of pulling out his astrolabe to get that precise six, Able held out three fingers for a rough five. How old had he been when Pa showed him how to measure the sky in fingers? How is it we're getting the same measurement when your hands are bigger than mine? The startled look on Pa's face could have been supplied by any of his memories. The one when even further than not knowing the answer, he had never himself thought to ask the question.

Everyone agreed Able asked too many. Even his patient and encouraging Uncle Noble, when it came to the question of what happened to Pa. The less you know, the better off you'll be.

The easternmost of the four lighthouses winked into life in the western sky, marking the place where the cliffs dropped down into the bay. Out in the open water, it looked like several ships were relying on them to guide them into the harbor. Beyond that, the northern horizon hiding Fairbanks, just over a thousand miles away, out of sight. An answer out there for him to go get it?

Maybe. From watching sailors use kamal, he'd realized his arm was shorter, therefore the distance from his face to his hand was the same ratio as Pa's.

Able shook his head as if that would rid him of the thought then descended the stairs. It was early yet for the city, the shroud of night managing to dim the color of the buildings but not the bustling life within or between them. Warehouse managers sent runners with messages and welcomed carts of goods even as they tried to board up for the night. One docked carrack had workers still loading it for its voyage come dawn.

Able couldn't stay present with it. Try as he might, he looked right through the restaurants lining the now lantern-lit boulevard as if their windows showed all the way to the wharves on the East side and not ladies adorned with costly gems and gentlemen marked with insignias of high office enjoying their drinks and starters. The cittern music spilling out into the street faded into the eerie silence of absent gulls. The sky rolled back to that midnight one of twelve years ago, where Able's thirteen-year-old eyes kept being startled by the stars of the Scepter on the horizon. Kept being spooked by the rows of unmanned vessels bobbing in the dark.

Worse than spooked by the three strangers on the deck of the Provider. They were not the sort of men you turned back on, Pa had said, though not to Able. Able wasn't supposed to know they were members of the rebellion. Wasn't supposed to know the scrawny, younger boy they'd deposited against the hull was the youngest son of King Impetus. Prince Plaudit hadn't looked like much with a gunny sack over his head and his wrists bound by leather cord sitting still as a mouse. Perhaps just as nervous as one, and Able couldn't blame him.

The biggest rebel man, Roper, had barked at Able twice while he was helping prepare the ketch for her journey North, leaving him rattled. And Able wasn't going along to Borealund, where the rebels intended to hand the child prince over to the Dagbrui to use as a hostage to bargain for peace. The war would be over. Practical's sixteenth birthday would come without a conscription notice. Tens of thousands of boys would be similarly spared.

Only none of that happened. After Practical helped launched the Provider—he'd pushed her well off before his younger brother could even apply his weight—she had slipped away into the darkness and was never heard from again. The war raged on another eight years.

Able stalled on his feet. They had dutifully carried him up all the familiar streets while he'd been lost in the past, and now he looked up at the arched sandstone face of the building that housed Well's Press and Printing. Their childless uncle had spared fatherless Practical from the draft by adopting him as heir to his print house. In this way, Pa had still saved his elder son by disappearing, as heirs to land and certain businesses were exempt while heirs to fishing vessels were not.